A bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about.

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iTunes Music Store API?

I can’t explain why, at least not yet, but I’m looking for a way to search the iTunes Music Store catalog outside of iTunes. Rumors of an iTunes-Google partnership have been flying lately, but what I really want is a webservice/API I can use. Yes, Apple offers an affiliate program that supports direct links, but again, they don’t offer an Amazon-style API to search their catalog.

All of this has me thinking about reverse-engineering the iTMS to build the webservice I’m looking for. DVD Jon made news not so long ago with PyMusique, now rewritten as SharpMusique, but even before that, Jason Rohrer released iTMS-4-all.

Rohrer’s work is more in line with what I’m trying to do, so I’m exploring that concept a little. iTMS-4-all is a simple web browsing interface to the store. Jean-Yves Stervinou explains:

iTunes 4 is a beautiful example of a “specialized browser”. It uses html to render pages with texts and pictures, but it also uses macosX standard GUI elements when appropriate. When you browse the albums/artists, iTunes in fact gets the contents of these lists from a Web server out there at Apple (phobos is its nickname). The format for these lists is XML […]. iTunes reads this XML list then uses a standard list browser to show you the content.

Stervinou describes the entire iTunes store as a REST webservice, but one which Apple has chosen to keep private. Rohrer describes the problems of interacting with the ITMS encrypted content. He (and contributors) were successful, but Apple changed the encryption after iTunes 4.7 was released. It didn’t take long for DVD Jon to get around the change, but it (or something else, I haven’t looked yet) has disabled iTMS-4-all. Too bad, too, because there’s a lot we might be able to do with such a webservice. DownhillBattle.org contemplates some of these uses in their iTMS-4-all announcement (Jason Rohrer is somehow involved with Downhill Battle).

Not exactly an API, but it does the job. I actually glued it together with Anazon Web Services, allowing people to select favorite albums for their member pages on my site. It works very well, with about 95% of the amazon selected albums matching up with an iTunes playlist. Pretty sweet!

My daughter bought some tunes from your company back in june using my credit card, we cancelled the account but yet you have charged my card
$1.99 for some reason and now I have a charge for $39.47 when we hven’t used this account since then. Email me how I can see the account, It will be under the name K’Lee Hamilton

Do you have the code anywhere to parse the search results? I’m actually looking to have individual songs linked to the appropriate iTunes song for download. Want to automate the Affiliate Program process.

I still can’t believe there isn’t an API for this.

Apple, get your head out of your asses! This would be a GREAT addition for you guys!

I developed a script that accesses the iTunes Music Store and pulls album information through a web browser. Putting it together with some AJAX, I developed cloudTunes (http://www.petrosalema.com/cloudtunes). Check it out; I think it is the sort of thing you’re talking about.

cloudTunes simply requests the same information as iTunes software but parses it and displays it as HTML.

Apple should definitely develop an open API or webservice for the iTMS, I can’t see how it wouldn’t be to their advantage.